Sound Human

You know, as if one human being were talking to another, rather than an ad speaking adspeak at some searchbot.

Yes, it’s an ad. And, yeah, you’re going to want to pack more into the ad than might comfortably fit if you were talking normally, but try to resist that.

More importantly, write each ad individually rather than taking a blanket/template-drive approach. This can be tough if you have a lot of SKUs, but then, there are solutions for that as well — like outsourcing the ad writing to professionals skilled at boosting CTR…

But however you decide to do it, just know that it makes a big difference to your ad effectiveness, quality scores, cost of acquisition, and so on. Case in point: these recent wins:

For the first ad, what sounds more human:

“Support the Pres!” or

“Support Pro Obama”?

Once you think about it, there’s no real mystery why the more human sounding ad nearly doubled response, boosting CTR by 96%

And for the second ad, which one do you think was written specifically for that campaign, and which one do you think relied on a template?

“Remember the Vietnam War,” or

“Support Vietnam War”?

I think it’s pretty obvious that nobody is “supporting” the Vietnam war. They may want to support Vietnam veterans or wish to remember the war and the veterans sacrifice, but “support” is just plan the wrong word for a war that ended 40 years ago.

These are huge gains. And they weren’t made by some technical, keyword-based strategies. It just took a competent ad writer sitting down and working to make the ads sound human. There’s nothing stopping YOU from sitting down and doing the same.

Unless, of course, bandwidth is an issue. And in that case, there’s nothing stopping you from outsourcing those writing duties to skilled professionals…